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Occupy Wall Street needs to occupy Congress and lobbyists - (www.washingtonpost.com) There is an unfocused financial rage in the United States. It was born in the late 1990s on an unholy trinity of accounting swindles, the dot-com collapse and analyst scandals. It grew on a housing boom and bust that created 5 million (and counting) foreclosures, leaving more than a quarter of bank-financed homes worth less than their mortgages. It matured on a growing wealth disparity that eviscerated the middle class and brought back the plutocracy of the 1920s. It reached its peak with the bailout of reckless bankers, who were rewarded for their irresponsibility with what may be the greatest wealth transfer in human history. And now it seems to be finding its voice with the movement known as Occupy Wall Street. Like the tea party, OWS began as a loose collection of people who knew they were getting a raw economic deal but were unsure precisely why. They both started with a surge of grass-roots politics. Both tapped into the national zeitgeist, feeding on the unfocused background radiation of economic angst. When the tea party burst onto the national stage, I had high hopes they would address some of the persistent economic problems that our two-party political system was ignoring. But the direction of the tea party tilted hard right, shifting from the economic to the partisan. Obamacare and taxes — neither of which were responsible for our laundry list of economic woes — became their focus.
AIG refuses to be outdone; blows taxpayer money at ultra luxury resort - (www.bloomberg.com) American International Group Inc. (AIG), the insurer majority owned by the U.S. after a 2008 bailout, is hosting an event at a California facility that advertises “the amenities of an ultra luxury hotel.” The American General unit assembled about 65 people who distribute its products for a two-and-a-half-day stay this week at the Resort at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach, California, said Larry Mark, a spokesman for AIG’s life insurance division. Nine AIG managers were also sent to the resort to make presentations, Mark said in a e-mail. He declined to say the cost of the event for the insurer. “It is important for these speakers, as well as the eight field representatives in attendance to spend quality, one-on-one time with our key distribution partners to ensure they understand our offerings,” he said. “It is standard practice in the financial-services industry to hold such business development, leadership meetings.”
How to Stretch Out a House Foreclosure for Years - (www.dailyfinance.com) Losing your home to foreclosure is traumatic, no doubt. And for a variety of reasons--from internal bank bureaucracy and missteps to slow-moving government programs--the pain can stretch out for months. It takes an average of 336 days for a home to move through the foreclosure process, from the first day a default notice was filed to the final disposition of the property, according to the latest report from RealtyTrac. That's the longest average since the 2007. For Janet, a 48-year-old attorney and mother of five who asked that her full name not be used, the process has stretched out for nearly 900 days, and counting. That's more than two years without paying a single mortgage payment. Her story is a lesson on how to keep a roof over your head. "It requires fortitude -- never take no for an answer -- and an ability to not become intimidated by paper," says Janet, who now lives on Social Security disability payments. "Paper is just paper. If it's a 40-page form, fill it out and send it in. Never let the process get in the way of the goal -- to stay in your home."
Short sales on the rise - (www.bloomberg.com) There has been a “dramatic shift” in banks’ willingness to sell a property for less than the mortgage balance to avoid foreclosing, said Ron Peltier, chairman and chief executive officer of HomeServices of America Inc., the second-biggest U.S. residential brokerage. The transactions, known as short sales, typically change hands at a discount of about 20 percent to homes not in financial distress, compared with a 40 percent price cut for bank-owned homes, according to RealtyTrac Inc. Short sales jumped 19 percent in the second quarter from the prior three months while foreclosure sales were flat, the data seller said. “Banks have become much more supportive of short sales,” said Peltier, whose Minneapolis-based company is a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. “That’s better for the lenders, who have smaller losses on a short sale, and it’s going to be better for homeowners, who won’t have as much psychological distress as a foreclosure.” Distressed sales brokered by HomeServices used to be 60 percent foreclosures and 40 percent short sales, Peltier said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. Now, that ratio has flipped, according to the CEO, whose company is second in size to NRT LLC, a unit of Realogy Corp. in Parsippany, New Jersey, that has about 700 offices under the Coldwell Banker brand. Default Backlog: “There’s a huge backlog of homes in default that the banks want to get rid of,” said Thomas Popik, research director for Campbell Surveys in Washington. “They don’t want to be homeowners.”
Democracy Versus Bankers at the Fed - (www.cepr.net) The Federal Reserve Board has provided the basis for thousands of conspiracy theories in its near-100-year existence. These conspiracies have some basis in reality as can be seen by the Fed’s recent moves on monetary policy. In the last two meetings of the Fed’s Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed’s key decision-making body, the members appointed through the political process unanimously supported stronger measures to spur growth and create jobs. By contrast, three of the five voting members appointed by the banking industry opposed further action. This extraordinary split has not received the attention it deserves. It suggests that the financial industry is using its power at the Fed to try to block the course preferred by the appointees of democratically elected officials of both parties. The Fed is an enormously important if poorly understood institution. Its control of monetary policy (primarily short-term interest rates) gives it the ability to speed up or slow growth. It also has enormous regulatory power. Alan Greenspan could have used this authority to put a check on the junk loans that fueled the housing bubble in the years 2002-2006.
Don't Be Suckered Into Buying House Now: 30-Year Mortgage is Prison - (www.informationclearinghouse.info)
Mortgage-Interest Deduction Debate - (www.bloomberg.com)
What Are the Answers? The Meagerness of the Republican Debates - (www.businessinsider.com)
American business is DOOMed - (www.ritholtz.com)
He Made It on Wall St. and Used It to Help Start Protests - (www.nytimes.com)
Dylan Ratigan on the protests - (www.nakedcapitalism.com)
Elizabeth Warren's Appeal - (www.nytimes.com)
Elizabeth Warren on Debt Crisis, Fair Taxation - (www.youtube.com)
Reagan and Bush staffer on tax reform, including mortgage interest - (www.nytimes.com)
Top Ten Unlikely Occupy Wall Street Supporters - (www.newyorker.com)
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